At Fuse, we are excited about the wave of online first brands that we’ve seen succeed over the past decade. In a recent post by Andy Dunn, he called these brands “digitally native vertical brands” and later, “v-commerce”.

Will digitally native e-commerce brands succeed?

We asked Matt Heiman, a consumer investor at Greylock to share his perspective: “My view is that vertically focused direct to consumer online brands are better positioned than pure 3rd party e-commerce concepts over the next few years. Particularly as Amazon approaches 40% of US e-commerce, competing with them is extremely difficult, so the idea of creating a new brand and owning your own customer experience is a better position. Some examples of brands I think have done this well are Casper, Dollar Shave Club and Warby Parker.”

We agree with Matt, and we think that the sale of Dollar Shave Club to Unilever earlier this year for $1 bn has convinced others that it’s possible to build a valuable brand that caters to a different kind of consumer online. Dollar Shave Club’s true value is in the company’s fantastic brand and it’s ability to appeal to and engage with Millennial consumers in an authentic way over social media and other digital marketing channels (1).

E-commerce platforms make it easy to build a brand

We’re seeing this trend first hand at Fuse. Our target customers are fast growing companies with at least 25 employees and anywhere from $10 - $100 million of revenue who are excelling at building their own online first brands. One company, Ipsy, knows all about brand building. Ipsy was started by Michelle Phan, who built her own personal brand as a make-up guru on YouTube. As the company has evolved, the brand which originally appealed to Michelle’s followers and the make-up obsessed, has started to reach more casual consumers looking to expand their horizons.

The good news for many of our customers is that it’s much easier to build a strong brand online today than it was five years ago. Due to the proliferation of front-end e-commerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce and Squarespace, it’s much easier to build a great brand with minimal upfront investment. With the emergence of Shopify Plus as an enterprise e-commerce platform for companies looking to scale, we expect this trend to continue.

Inventory management systems haven't kept up (until now)

Although this is good news for many aspiring brand builders, the unfortunate reality is that back-end tools and platforms haven’t necessarily kept up with the front-end. Shopify has done a great job building an ecosystem around its API, but there are still a lot of gaps on the back-end. That’s where we at Fuse come in. Our goal is to help simplify the inventory planning process to help companies answer the key question related to their biggest investment: “How much should I order?” We’re really excited about the growth of online first brands in the market, and are just as excited to be able to help those brands focus on their business, not their inventory.